The "Airline" brand is on the dial glass, printed in very small letters at the very bottom--not sure why so small. A label inside also explains the brand and tube layout but the bugs ate most of it.

I really like the suggestion about extending the shaft--beats having to dig up new components. It's working with what's there, but just won't reach through the hole for a new knob. I'll get that straight and the tone control will be back.

Cloth will be silk, (with a little texture to it, adds visual interest) and lightbulbs will be dull. I didn't know adding hot ones could mess up the transformer.

I need to post some more pics soon--the cabinet is turning out a lot nicer than I was expecting.

As an update I am partly done re-capping the set. I'm using yellow capacitors and some electrolytics for the filter. Unfortunately I ordered a bunch of the wrong capacitors and not enough of the values I need...somehow I got excited.

The radio seems to work okay, but the tuning capacitor is a little wobbly on its mountings. I will have to modify that. The tuning eye tube works wonderfully.

Tuning in to a standard broadcast is easy--spin the dial until you get a good strong tone and then turn it up. But shortwave is very tricky to receive. The shortwave stations seem to take up less dial room. Here the eye tube comes into its own.

I did another bit of work--cut the wires to the capacitor can & installed 2 new electrolytics under the chassis, grounding them off with the metal mounting tabs used to hold the can in place. Sounds great with new filters. Need to get some more caps (I didn't count them right--got lost under the chassis--and ordered the wrong kinds for some of them.)

It's all coming together & I hope that the radio will be complete soon. Questions for you experts:

1. Is there a way to improve the selectivity of the tuner? I can't exactly tune in easily. It's only catching short spots on the dial for the channel. (I don't have the dial string hooked up yet. Pointer's broke.)

Not sure I understand the problem, but if the tuner doesn't rotate easily, try shooting some WD-40 into the ball bearings in front, and at the center and rear of the tuner shaft, and rotate it a few times.

O/W please describe the problem in more depth. Actually, getting the dial strung will definitely help with more pinpoint tuning, since you are then leveraging the tuner rotation, and can get it more precise.

_________________\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\He Who Dies With The Most Radios Wins/////////////////////////

Well, electrically the old thing works great. Needs new lightbulbs in the dial & a dial cord now, so that's the next project.

The model is 62-363 of course & the Sams dial cord guide hasn't got anything. I'm looking in there at the crooked tuning capacitor & wondering if perhaps the thing wasn't replaced by Mr. Fixit back in the 1940s. After all, he did add a whole 'nother TUBE to the set, so why not a new tuning cap?

Anyway, if you reach in through the back & spin the wheel it will tune normally, but there's a bit of wobble in tuning because of Hand Near Radio Syndrome (when you move your hand it changes the tuning slightly, and if you wiggle the pulley up and down it will make it more sensitive on SW, and all that.)

I don't think that you can expect too much for selectivity on shortwave, I'm not sure what the frequency spread is on this set but many of those two band jobs had a shortwave band that covered everything from 6 to 18 mc and everything in-between. It has just enough selectivity to pick up the strong stations but not the weaker ones, and definitely not any HAMs on the air, since everything is packed together, a National H.R.O it is not. One reason why it may be a hot set on AM broadcast is that it has two IF amplifier tubes, restively coupled, which helps the sensitivity but not the selectivity much at all. This was a trick used on many battery radios that I have encountered, sort of a cheap alternative to adding a tuned RF amplifier stage, though it would help the selectivity if they had added a third IF transformer, which Philco liked to do in the 1940s, and transistor radio manufacturers did in the 1960s. The set would probably benefit from an alignment in terms of selectivity, both in the IF and the oscillator, after you finish recapping, if you can do that, or find someone to help. It also would not hurt checking the resistor values while you are in there, as long as they are within 20% of rated value they are fine.RegardsArran

Oddly enough, one night I fired up the chassis outside of the case & hooked up about 20 or 30 feet of insulated copper wire as antenna, hanging it from the ceiling & the window shades.

The radio picked up Radio Havana, someone on a wireless telegraph sending Morse code, operatic selections from Europe, strange backwoods sermons, and a very British talk show about vegetarianism or something that I didn't catch a call sign on. It's not too bad.

If I could ever get the dial pointer fixed I think it'd be a decent radio receiver--it's VERY hot on AM. I'm shocked. I was also shocked when I attempted to rob a power cord to test a radio...I went for the cord on a 1916 Emerson electric fan, thinking it'd be easy to unhook. Two bolts on the bottom right? Well, I didn't unplug the fan first.

But this was a different kind of shocked. I am super impressed with this thing on AM but it will not tune with a dial cord. I think the tuning capacitor is in there crooked--there's damage to the edge of the pulley where the cord went through and I can't get a cord to stay on.

I fixed the dial & can tune it with the knob, like a PROPER radio, for the first time in years (the last guy did the repairs in the early 90s I think, before I was born yet.)

Anyhow, it tunes great on AM & Shortwave now, and I can hear all over the place. I caught Voice of America, Radio Havana, and someone out of Spain playing beautiful classical recordings and I love it. The wooden cabinet & six-inch speaker make a great pair acoustically.

Tuning eye glows nice & green but no longer works. I think the capacitors aren't doing much so I will be changing the last few--yes, I put in new filters and others but ran out of capacitors during my restoration. It sounds nice but not REAL nice.

Also in adding silk grill cloth (which really makes this set pretty) I accidentally stapled through the front of the cabinet from inside, so I'm going to be doing some wood-working. The hot glue gun was a lot easier...

...Trying to read those flat tablet-looking mica capacitors is tough & I will be taking a few days to do it. ...

As already observed, mica caps seldom go bad and the general protocol for dealing with them is to leave them alone unless troubleshooting proves them to be faulty.

But going beyond that, some mica caps have an unfortunate internal-construction weakness that provides an even more compelling reason to literally not touch them: rotating their bodies on their leads frequently breaks the internal electrical connection between the leads and the internal plates, ruining them.

These flat caps are often installed with the code markings not fully readable in their installed position. So, the natural impulse is to simply rotate the cap bodies until their markings can be seen. Doing so has a high probability of destroying the cap.

Because these caps are used mostly in resonant circuits, breaking such a cap can cause complete failure of the radio's tuner section which will cause unnecessary troubleshooting (not to mention confusion).